Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology provide an innovative model for reshaping digital services. Driven by the movement toward Web 3.0, recent systems started to provide distributed services, such as computation outsourcing or file storage, on top of the currency exchange medium. By allowing anyone to join and collect cryptocurrency payments for serving others, these systems create decentralized markets for trading digital resources. Yet, there is still a big gap between the promise of these markets and their practical viability. Existing initiatives are still early-stage and have already encountered security and efficiency obstacles. At the same time, existing work around promising ideas, specifically sidechains, fall short in exploiting their full potential in addressing these problems. To bridge this gap, we propose chainBoost, a secure performance booster for decentralized resource markets. It expedites service related operations, reduces the blockchain size, and supports flexible service-payment exchange modalities at low overhead. At its core, chainBoost employs a sidechain, that has a (security and semantic) mutual-dependence with the mainchain, to which the system offloads heavy/frequent operations. To enable it, we develop a novel sidechain architecture composed of temporary and permanent blocks, a block suppression mechanism to prune the sidechain, a syncing protocol to permit arbitrary data exchange between the two chains, and an autorecovery protocol to support robustness and resilience. We analyze the security of chainBoost, and implement a proof-of-concept prototype for a distributed file storage market as a use case. For a market handling around 2000 transactions per round, our experiments show up to 11x improvement in throughput and 94\% reduction in confirmation time. They also show that chainBoost can reduce the main blockchain size by around 90%.

翻译：加密货币与区块链技术为重塑数字服务提供了创新模式。受Web 3.0发展浪潮驱动，近期系统开始在以货币交换媒介为基础的顶层提供分布式服务（如计算外包或文件存储）。通过允许任何人加入并接收加密货币支付以服务他人，这些系统构建了交易数字资源的去中心化市场。然而，这些市场的愿景与其实际可行性之间仍存在巨大鸿沟。现有项目尚处于早期阶段，已遭遇安全与效率障碍。与此同时，围绕侧链等富有前景理念的现有研究，未能充分发挥其潜力解决上述问题。为弥合这一鸿沟，我们提出chainBoost——面向去中心化资源市场的安全性能增强器。该方案可加速服务相关操作、减少区块链体积，并以低开销支持灵活的服务-支付兑换模式。其核心采用侧链架构，该侧链与主链存在（安全与语义层面的）相互依赖关系，系统将繁重/高频操作转移至侧链执行。为实现这一目标，我们开发了由临时区块与永久区块组成的新型侧链架构、用于修剪侧链的区块抑制机制、支持双链任意数据交换的同步协议，以及保障鲁棒性与弹性能力的自动恢复协议。我们分析了chainBoost的安全性，并以分布式文件存储市场为用例实现了概念验证原型。针对每轮处理约2000笔交易的市场，实验表明吞吐量提升最高达11倍，确认时间降低94%，同时可将主区块链体积缩减约90%。